Microsoft Research has been involved in a variety of visualization research efforts over the last twelve years. In this talk, I will summarize the various threads of research, which include task management, personal information management, software visualization, business visualization, community visualization, graph and tree visualization, and visual analytics for homeland security. I will give demonstrations of key prototypes that have been built. One of the key challenges throughout this work has been developing effective means of evaluation of visualization techniques. I will summarize what we have learned about evaluation methods. Finally, I will summarize some basic lessons learned about what visualization techniques are most effective across all of these research efforts.